Longshot O'Leary Counsels Direct Action

McGrath’s poetry was always informed by his political radicalism, though often in subtle ways. Building on his Midwestern roots, he actively participated in political activism throughout his life. Especially formative was his time working as a shipyard welder and labor organizer in New York in the early 1940s; during that time he met some of the vibrant personalities that later appeared in Letter to an Imaginary Friend, and he also worked on a teamster paper and an Irish radical pamphlet called the Shamrock. These experiences shaped his 1949 collection Longshot O’Leary’s Garland of Practical Poesie and also became the basis for his proletarian novel This Coffin has No Handles, which tells the story of a waterfront strike.

In the following decades, he was a regular contributor of poetry and reviews to prominent Communist-affiliated magazines including New Masses and Mainstream. But during McGrath’s Los Angeles period he clashed with Communist Party cultural leader John Howard Lawson on the group’s direction and found himself marginalized. Moreover, he continued to bristle against the increasing rigidity of the CP’s aesthetic principles, countering with his own theory of the distinction between “tactical” and “strategic” poetry. Tactical poetry, he argued, has a political purpose; it is directed at specific events and seeks to energize people to take action. Strategic poetry, however, aims more experimentally at broader shifts of consciousness. McGrath’s own persona of Longshot O’Leary represented an attempt to combine these two modes.